The 262,000 child question...

An excellent new report on childhood injury has been published by WHO and Unicef. Key findings - road crashes are the single largest cause of injury death (more than a fifth of the total) for children and young people under 19, with 262,000 deaths estimated in 2004. The report http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/child/injury/world_report/en/index.html makes vital reading.

At the launch in Hanoi today the Unicef director in Vietnam made the good point that his agency and others have been concentrating so hard on infant and childhood diseases that they've largely ignored child injury - an approach he is keen to see change. That change has to come from within, and the participation from the Unicef side (WHO sent a deputy Director General and the Director of Injury Prevention) was disappointing. So top marks for producing a powerful report, but now it would be great to see the evidence having an impact on priorities.

Gatecrashing the Clinton Global Initiative

Well, not gatecrashing exactly. Our campaign ambassador Michelle Yeoh was invited. But nobody was expecting her to use her speaking slot to launch into an impassioned call for the assembled politicians, philanthropists and business leaders to add road safety to their priority list. As Michelle's co-star Jet Li signed one of our Decade signature boards, she reeled off some of the shocking statistics that make it very hard to argue against including road traffic injury as a subject for future CGI meetings, not to mention some of the other fora where the world's elite meet to debate the world's ills and what to do about them.

Michelle seems to have convinced her audience: signatories to our call for a Decade of Action included Bill Clinton himself and film director Oliver Stone...someone who knows a good conspiracy (of silence) when he sees it.